Sale information
A back-to-school collection...
Millon is pleased to present for sale a private French collection devoted to three major fields:
Archaeology
Haute époque
Ancient paintings
A selection guided by the eye of an amateur attracted by the evocative power of objects, rarity and originality.
Thus, a François de Troy with an original portrait of Claude Le Blanc with a cup of tea in a magnificent porcelain cup, a rare panel from the Catalan school showing the Virgin Mary, an exceptional wood and bone veneer box dating from the 11th century, an impressive altarpiece representing the Passion of Christ, a treasure trove of sculpture and painting, a very rare piece from the Bleu Céleste service of Louis XV made by the Manufacture de Vincennes and many other treasures to be discovered at Drouot on September 20.
One taste, two periods, one theme
For 25 years, I've been a happy collector, buying mainly in London, where I used to live, and in France, a variety of antique objects, mostly related to archaeology or the Middle Ages - the Haute Epoque. It was a childhood taste, reinforced during my studies of philosophy and theology. My dissertation at the time probably "lit the fuse", studying certain concepts linking St Augustine and Duns Scotus. And that, in the final analysis, is the key, the "red thread" - and also the foundation - of this collection.
Antiquity and the Middle Ages.
In essence, there is a continuity from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, explicitly intended by these thinkers, and therefore essential; and a shift from one to the other, of course. I wanted to grasp and apprehend these realities, conceptually, but also sensitively, through the concrete presence of artifacts produced by the minds and hands of these people, so close to us, from whom we come, and yet totally foreign. These objects are like bubbles of a different air, which have by some extraordinary means traveled to us from different worlds, and which burst in our own, releasing a strange perfume that is not totally foreign to us...
Religion
It has always seemed to me, on the other hand, that beyond worldly, social and even political realities, religion, the spiritual, forms the deepest layer of human experience, and that everything else moves as if in its orbit, is subordinate to it.
Divinity defines itself as That which Is, beyond Time, that is, That which makes that which is Is. A Roman would probably have seen the "deos semper vivos" as the Principle of Life, and a Greek as the source of all Truth. The Christic "ego sum via etc.", incidentally, brings these different points of view together in a single formula. With such definitions, the postulate of the centrality of religion, far from seeming audacious, is almost tautological! But it doesn't matter if it is: it gives an account of the hierarchy of human things like no other. It also has the advantage, in that it is perfectly anachronistic, of painting our modernity as an enigma or an absurdity, which is also a very reasonable starting point.
Religion, then - but taken in a very broad sense!
From St. Augustine, from the Roman and philosophical origins of our Christianity, to Duns Scotus, who posited the famous "principle of individuation", from classical antiquity to the late Middle Ages, with "religion" at its center: this is our subject. And yet, as you'll notice at first glance, we'll happily stray beyond its bounds, though without ever quite losing sight of it.
The pre-Classical periods
We have a number of objects from the "pre-Classical" civilizations, from Hadrian's Wall to the satrapies of Persia, which are very diverse, but also share a certain civilizational community. Why is this? The nature of religious man - a pleonasm for just about all our predecessors - has recently become so alien to us that we struggle to understand the workings of his mind or the concepts that were natural to him. In all likelihood, medieval man had more in common in his religiosity with our forebears from the earliest times than with ourselves.
Take our sedes sapientae, for example, whose type appeared shortly after the year 1000: they reveal a relationship between man and the object representing divinity that was very different from the objects of devotion that were to succeed it. This evolution, and the condemnation dating from the Reformation period, associating traditional devotion with fetishism or superstition, almost inevitably continue to taint our judgement of them, even without depreciatory character. Yet there is a profound and essential theology of Mary, throne of wisdom, bearing and presenting the principle of the world, which was then renewed from its Byzantine origin. This theology, which is of course absolutely conceptual and ideal in itself, is made tangible by these statues, and certainly immediately felt and understood by the faithful.
The dogmatic referent of these sedes is explicitly the Incarnation, as in all Marian veneration, Christ being "Incarnatus ex Maria Virgine". But it is doubly so in this case, as it is in its aesthetic mode of representation. Indeed, in this art, the Idea is made sensible without any mediation whatsoever - hence the suspicion of fetishism - reiterating, so to speak, in a concrete way that "the logos becomes flesh". This is in contrast to later aesthetic modes, in which an element of intellectual interpretation, which can go as far as symbolism, or on the contrary, using the medium of emotion, will be responsible for conveying the Idea, illustrating it.
This identity of Idea and sensibility is not a particular characteristic of sedes. If this character disappears in later periods, it is on the contrary shared with the essence of earlier religious art. A close relationship with the art of earlier periods helps us to understand these differences, and this is one of its interests.
In conclusion, I wouldn't be so bold as to suggest that our sedes have much in common with the 7th-century hieratic Cypris, for example, or the archaic bronze kouros also on display, but it seems to me that, with a little thought, such parallels open up some interesting perspectives.
Similarly, the spread of these objects over a long historical period enables us to envisage the lineaments of religious themes across civilizations, whether Ishtar-Astarte, Cypris-Aphrodite, the mistress of animals, Potnia Theron, Artemis, etc., all figures continued in some way in the traditional Christian religion. Pushing comparisons too far, wanting to give them a scientific quality, and looking for effective filiations, can prove artificial. It's more a question of drawing parallels, to help us become more familiar with each of these types.
The modern period
Whatever the power and appeal I find in these plunges into the past, the fact remains that, as far as I'm concerned, my interest in the past ultimately stems from a questioning of ourselves in the present. The question that drives all this is: why are we so different from everything that came before us, and yet constitutes the clay of which we are made? Or, to take it the other way round: aren't we in fact something other than what we think we are, we who think of ourselves as essentially profane and rational before we are religious, material before we are spiritual, individual before we are social? Such a construction corresponds to a strange reversal of the hierarchy of the traditional order. It's one of two things: either we've really succeeded in this tour de force of a transmutation of our nature, or it's only an appearance, and reality is essentially unchanged. So, while the traditional state of things, of which the objects we have brought together provide us with a diverse but coherent image, still fundamentally reigns, it no longer does so with our conscious assistance, but as if in spite of us. The price of this false situation is that our intelligence itself no longer participates in this general order, even though it was made precisely for this purpose: "ad imaginem Dei creavit illum".
So we're also exploring the last few centuries, those that live by the "individuation principle" rightly brought to light by our author, in order to grasp what remains of what has been the fabric of life since the dawn of time. We venture at least as far as the end of the eighteenth century, and into areas that seemed profane, tracking down the religious wherever it may have metamorphosed.
Spain
There is a special interest in Spain, from the Romanesque to the Baroque, in statuary, furniture and painting. This is perhaps the "heart of the matter", or at least one of them. I believe that Spain had a predestined role to play, in that it established for us a "different" modernity, heavy precisely with the silt of the ancient ages, and for this reason, strong and lively, with a promising future. Where Italy, vaunted for the shimmer of its diversity, was in reality impoverished in substance, Spain, from the end of the 14th century onwards, enriched by material from the North, renewed in the crucible of its intact faith, was building true modernity through the coherence of its theology, which would soon irrigate Europe. The France of Louis XIV looked to solutions from across the Pyrenees - see Corneille and the Saints of the Great Century. At the heart of the Spanish experience was the fact that, far from combating the common spiritual legacy, the rationalism of the new age took it as its foundation, as classical scholasticism had attempted to do before it came to a halt in 1277. The new world was thus founded on the continuation of the old. The geometric urban planning of the new Spain (Puebla de los Angeles, 1531) or, in architecture, the palace of "Charles V" (1527) in Granada, are creations of the mind in which we sense this "pure" rationality, for us the mark of the European 17th century, even though we are here in the first 16th century! Crucially, however, there's nothing here of the dryness customary to our classicism. This deeply Romanized Hispania, all about expansion in the 15th and 16th centuries, avoided the poison of doubt that elsewhere in the West ended the Middle Ages and created a chiasmus separating the new times from the living source that had irrigated our civilization since its origins.
In painting, we begin with our Gothic Saint Anne, the new Athena, patron saint of science, here with an extraordinary presence, of great hieratic severity and at the same time rich in all the material and golds that embutido allows. This blend of asceticism and material voluptuousness is characteristic of this art, with the latter entirely at the service of the spirit. This contrast is echoed in a slightly different context shortly afterwards, in the paroxysmal sculptures of passion. In both cases, it is a sensitive representation of the essential mystery of Christianity, the Incarnation, of the fact that the Idea is for us insofar as it becomes flesh, that the flesh is only for and through the Idea.
From there, we move on to our reborn Saint Helena, hsp, with precise features, indifferent to all formal ideals. Everything here is ordered to the essential, in this case the presentation of the most insignificant of relics, the true cross and the instruments of the passion, relics par excellence in that they are the tangible proof of the resurrection. Their inventor - who, incidentally, offers them in the Roman style, with his hands covered by a drapery - thus indicates to the "very Catholic" king the role of essential support of the religion that defines royalty. Theologically, it's a question of confirming the irruption of the divine into our earthly world, through these essential and recurring signs in the Middle Ages, which link earth and heaven. Once again, a variation on the central figure of the Incarnation, of God made present in this world, this time at the heart of History. The aesthetics here, very characteristically, adopt Renaissance codes while rejecting their principles. Thus, in the medieval tradition, the theological intention remains the sole master of form, to the exclusion of any rule or limitation that might be laid down independently, prior to it. Yet it is precisely the rejection of such a position that constitutes the essence of Renaissance innovation, as will be discussed below.
Trent, the Spanish Council, was an edifice built less against the Reformation than against the profane temptations of Venice and Florence. While it did, of course, give rise to a style in art, its essential role was to pass on the invigorating ideas of the past to modernity, in renewed forms, adapted to the times, but always with the aim of remaining faithful - as far as possible! This refounding was the foundation on which Europe prospered for centuries to come.
In its wake we have the Sevillian angel couple, the tabernacle cabinet, the beautiful niño from Juan de Mesa's workshop, St. Anthony of Padua or the reliquary bust of St. Placid, some treated in beautiful estofado. And many more.
"Illustrate and educate", not worship, is the new motto. But it was already the motto used by Charlemagne's chancellery to chastise the Emperor of the East. It would also describe quite well the narrative project of the mosaics of Santa Maria Maggiore, at the dawn of Christian art. And yet, at the same time, these sculptures are more than that, like the devotional statues of the central Middle Ages mentioned above. Less than icons, more than grandiose theatrical figures. In spite of its novelty, Spanish Baroque is tied to the great Western tradition in its very ambiguities: it is part of the same flesh.
Antiquity
There's nothing more refreshing for us moderns, shaped or deformed by these "returns to our roots" which are more really denials of our substantive heritage - by which I mean the Renaissance, Classicism, etc. - than to really get to know Antiquity. Nothing is more salutary than to immerse oneself in the very sources of our art and civilization, to discover its richness, its inventiveness, its coherence, yet its simplicity. Take, for example, our pygmies attacking a swan, a fragment of a second-century fresco, full of gentleness and fantasy, like the later Cazale children.
So let's look at animals in art over time.
In the Middle Ages, they had an enchanted character, with humans and animals intertwined, as in literature, for example, in Renart's novel. Art provides us with renewed illustrations of the human soul in its multiple faces. Are these animals humanized by the process of pictorial narration, or is it the pantheism of nature that allows us to recognize ourselves in it? These semi-human horses, for example, remind us of Achilles' horses in dialogue with him, like the one on our fragment of an altarpiece stamped with Antwerp iron. The animals of antiquity are quite different. They are certainly not neutral and indifferent as in modern times, nor are they humanized as they would become in the Middle Ages. They are linked to us in some way, they have a "personality" that we can sense, but they are not totally familiar with us. We have several fine examples of this: our eagles with their clearly drawn feathers, or these bronze lions, including our beautiful large head from a door knocker, not forgetting, on the side, our stone lion or cheetah from El Andalus.
The existence of this in-between identity and otherness is one of the distinctive features of the Roman spirit, and not without historical consequences. The other, the barbarian, the Etruscan, the Egyptian, is at once different yet part of the same human community, with gods that, while unique to him, are cousins to our own. Ra, for example, is regarded in epigraphy as a local version of Apollo. And the famous translation of the Etruscan Uni de Veii, to join the Capitoline triad. "Visne Roma ire, Iuno?
Reflecting, in a way, this universalism respectful of local identities, our Romano-Egyptian female mask, which stands out for its quality among productions of this type, is of interest precisely because it also refers to these two cultures.
Also of interest are two fine examples from the Parthian and Sassanid empires, Rome's counterparts at the gateway to the Orient: a silver spoon with a griffin and a dish, also in silver, with agrarian scenes, which also opens up a perspective towards the medieval, Muslim Orient, which inherited these forms.
Medieval sculpture
I have a particular taste, in sculpture, for groups. They allow for a momentum, an exchange, a narrative beyond the possibilities of individual sculpture. Such is the case with our large, truculent climbing group on Golgotha (early 16th century, Burgos?). And, of course, the great Antwerp altarpiece (1500), which, following in the footsteps of the entire Middle Ages, uses a unity of place in its narrative, not shying away from assembling temporally disjointed elements in the same scene, even duplicating the central characters. This is a characteristic that was about to come to an end, and whose repudiation would be the sign of a profound break in thought patterns. Hitherto, knowledge in its generality had been necessarily hierarchical, and ordered as if at its center to the First Principle, since Aristotelianism, and in other forms higher still.
In a mutation that did not touch on the essentials, at the time of the Church it was Christ who became the pinnacle and guarantor of all things, and first and foremost of the possibility of knowledge: "unum omnium magister Christus", to quote the title of a famous sermon by Saint Bonaventure. As a result, the human mind is immediately adequate to the world, since the Creator of both, God, is Himself Intelligence, and this character is communicated to both man and the world. All intelligibility, on the other hand, leads naturally back to this same first principle; it does not exist in itself. This is both its nature and its purpose.
For the Renaissance, as we have already mentioned, which believed it could find in Rome a "secular" rationality in itself, the situation was different. It is a formal rational framework, whose rules apply to everyone in this world, and from which "God himself cannot be abstracted". The result is like a second expulsion from paradise, in that our world discovers a certain distance from God, which in turn can be seen as a new autonomy. The two spheres, the divine and the human, have in all cases lost their previous intimacy. Perspective, or the abstract rules of ideal beauty, symbolically illustrate this new reason, which both emancipates man insofar as it is his own, and enslaves him because it is of bronze, and no longer leads back to the author of all Peace.
The second altarpiece, the small German altarpiece of private piety, is one of the most beautiful pieces we have, with its graceful sculpture ideally magnifying the delicate theme of the Visitation, and with its painted figures that intimately evoke the liturgical scenes of the late Middle Ages - candlelit processions, pilgrimages. The characteristic wiggle of the two women in the depiction of this mystery illustrates the communication of two unborn children, one divine, the other his herald, which is transmitted to both mothers in the form of profound joy. On the one hand, it's the beginning of the veneration of "the mother of my Lord", and yet it's also a scene of the utmost simplicity and familiarity, between two cousins all rejoicing at their forthcoming conception. This object is also extremely rare.
Elsewhere, Elisabeth's son, John the Baptist, is depicted in 15th-century limestone, with a remnant of polychromy. It is resolutely regional, even local in style, and yet - or perhaps because of this, as it avoids school formulas - is highly interesting, for at least two reasons. Firstly, its powerful, even rugged style illustrates the asceticism and savagery of the man who "was dressed in camel skin and fed on locusts". Secondly, his figuration is entirely focused on the function of the Savior's herald, pointing with one long finger to the lamb, beautifully blending realism and symbolism.
The figure of ecce homo is a window onto metaphysical questions. Pilate's Quid est Veritas still resonates in the proximity of death and sacrifice, reminding us that for theology, the absolute springs from the depths of nothingness, "in the belly of the earth three days and three nights". Before revoking the Mosaic law to found a new mode of divine presence, Christ, in the parable of the adulteress, "remained silent, writing with his fingers on the earth", an unmistakable rite of invocation of the telluric powers.
We present two examples of Christ with very different links, but in some ways similar. The large one, which adorned the chapel of a village cemetery in the Avesnois region of France, 1500, is overwhelming. It is the most beautiful of its type - common at the time - that I have ever seen, and one of the finest sculptures in the present collection. It is one of the few works, in my experience, that has the power to captivate and bring to a contemplative state minds that come from different horizons and are completely ignorant of this spirituality.
The second, Spanish Baroque, is also very touching, with a deep meditation and a complexion that is both realistic and ideally translucent, reinforcing the tension of the flesh towards the beyond. This is a good example of the way in which 17th-century Spanish art oriented its vocabulary towards intimacy and sentiment, not through the influence of profane emotions but through an opposite movement of theology that greatly affected common sensibility, first in Spain, then elsewhere. Thus the moment of passion, devoid of pathos in earlier tradition and Scripture itself, became the focal point of the theology of the time, as the best illustration of the pivot of divine sacrifice redeeming humanity. At a time when individual experience of piety was moving beyond traditional collective practice, it also appeared particularly suited to individual feeling, enabling "imitatio Christi" for oneself through projection and feeling. The culmination of this evolution in art is illustrated by our 18th-century Infant Jesus. A path certainly not without risks.
Legacy
Our modern paintings themselves do not really escape the religious theme or ancient heritage. For example, the Louis XVI coronation, one of the finest paintings of its kind, evokes the fundamentally sacred nature of the royal person. The oldest epigraphy to come down to us from Rome, the lapis niger of the forum, already reveals the original king as a rex sacrorum, a quasi-priest. Louis XVI was steeped in pre-Revolutionary principles in both word and deed - for example, he was the first to refer to the tiers as the national assembly - and like most of his contemporaries, including the nobility, he no longer understood the organic logic of monarchical society, as expressed for the last time in the famous flagellation speech. And yet, if there was one feeling that was widely shared during those tragic years, it was that of the intrinsic sacredness of the monarch, and therefore of the irreplaceable loss, the debasement for the natio francorum and for each individual, that resulted from the debasement of the person of the king, and then from his irretrievable destruction. The testimonies of the time, from whatever part of society they come from, leave this unambiguously clear. Symbolically, the "nothing" of the hunting notebook, reminders of the obsessive role of the hunt right up to the last moments, take us back to the mythical and extraordinary lion hunts of Assurbanipal, the founder of the very royal figure for our entire civilizational basin (British Museum). The symbolic representative of society, the intermediary between men and God, had always been a master of animals. His disastrous disappearance was to prolong the political break that our world had begun to make with its heritage.
In a way, Louis XVI did not reign: his first political act, the recall of the parliaments and the dismissal of the triumvirate, was also his last. He undid his predecessor's victory over the party that, throughout his reign, had wished to bring him and the monarchy down with him, and so surrendered to them without return. Louis XV, our last king in the full sense of the word, was the most endearing of men, even in his weaknesses. He was endowed with great political instincts ("I'm loath to undo what my fathers did"), unfortunately spoiled by his indecision and the influence of women. We have a precious memento of this sovereign: a trivet from the mythical celestial blue service. This service is distinguished by the beauty of its colors and paints, and the novelty of its process. Our piece comes from the first years of production (LL: 53-54). In his memoirs, the Duc de Croÿ recalls how Louis XV had the service admired by the regulars of the petits couverts when it was delivered. We can thus imagine that the king may have taken this object, now offered to our senses, into his hands to present it to his intimates and praise its merits.
As for our large-format van Loo, does it escape our theme? On the contrary! With all the charm of the Regency, we have here a figure of Pater familias (Maine?), a fundamental heritage of Rome still preserved in all its flesh, with the benevolent dominus, a father in the presence of his children, far removed from any female figure. It's perfectly natural, and at the same time, nothing could be more essential, i.e., imbued with religious gravitas. What was Pietas? Not religious piety, as we understand it today, but the respect due to ancestors, and first and foremost to the father. An attitude associated with the continuity of life itself, the rectitude of its existence and, ultimately, the maintenance of peace, in a broad, metaphysical sense. This ancient conception is still perceptible here, which makes this painting so bewitching not only at first glance, but above all over time, for those lucky enough to live in its aura.
More simply, our charming young Foote, in costume, in stoic 18th-century England, who belonged for a time to Mr. Mould, participates more modestly in the same movement.
Unique
Last but not least, the pinnacle of fascinating and mysterious works is this casket, C14 dated shortly after the year 1000. The apparent link to the Bayeux style may be a red herring, as it bears no resemblance to Siculo-Norman production. It is given as Mosan. Its walls feature alternating religious and secular, warlike and symbolic, marine and terrestrial motifs, some evoking Ottonian or Byzantine art (the angels). What is its function? Chest, arch, portable altar? And its destination? Despite a number of interesting studies, the mystery remains. And so it is with unique objects.
